Flatten Your Underwear For You?

Yesterday’s Times had funny signs from all over in a kind of English we find laughable (as if we could speak a single word of Mandarin, say. ) They remind me of my favorite sign from a hotel in Yugoslavia: “The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid."I know I still savor the memory of a Thai restaurant  menu I saw once, with entrées of a most exotic kind: 'Hearty Sweethearts' (for when your girlfriend starts to really get on your nerves?) or 'Spicy Friend' (for when a former pal does something unforgivable and you have to put him in the wood-chipper like in that movie Fargo?) They had a  dish called 'Excited Chicken' and one called 'Dancing Duck' along with the cheerleading favorite 'Pacific All the Way!' (exclamation point right there on the menu.)  We laugh but could we do better?Even I can’t get the English right, when it comes to texting. My thumbs get pretty excited themselves and land on the wrong keys. Add in predictive spelling and I’m  in real trouble.  I was texting a young person the other day who I was supposed to bring to the doctor; hoping he might be waiting outside for me, I thought I'd quick punched in “I’m coming” - only what I ended up sending thanks to the help of Blackberry’s Predictive Spelling feature  was “I’m vomiting.” (“Are you all right?” came his reply.)When my last child still lived at home, his two older sisters having left the nest, I guess you could say the IQ level  in the house kind of dropped in the sense that the two of us seemed to find everything  funny. He was in middle school when we saw The Fabulous Decomposing Ball which you could buy for a quarter from one of these little vending machines at the front of the supermarket. We bought one and unfolded the instructions that came with it: (1) Hold in Hand,  it said. (2) Drop to Floor. (3) Have Fun Decomposing.... And I don’t know about my age-immune young pup of a son but I’ve been doing just that ever since.